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Monday, September 18, 2006

First Results

Test panel from Stickleback episode one(due to appear in Prog 2007, on sale December 2006)

Did a trial page for Stickleback over the weekend - I'm using a new (for me) technique, inspired by the collage work of Argentinian comic artist Alberto Breccia (specifically, his work on Perramus in the 1980's).It's always a bit nerve-wracking trying a change of direction - new techniques that seem great in trial runs can prove unwieldy when faced with the day-to-day grind of comics production, but the trial page went well. It does you good to shake things up every so often... the slight uncertainty of not completely knowing what I'm doing adds a definite frisson to the working day. I find I'm much keener to get down to work than I have been for months.

7 comments:

Yes it's a very interesting style, very organic looking. I'm interested to see how it'll all look, especially when I think of the description Mr Edginton gave us of Stickleback back in May (at Bristol) when the trade due out! :>Sir Ian McKellan

Hi Popartists... I'm flattered at the comparison to Corben, though I'd be very surprised if my work were to match up to his!Aside from his incredible talent, Corben also had an extremely sophisticated knowledge of printing... so most of his early classic colour strips (Den, Mutant World), were produced by painting in shades of grey on four different sheets of acetate - these would then be turned directly into the four-colour printing plates necessary to produce his full-colour painted art. However, this meant he never saw a colour image until the pages printed... he had to rely entirely on his knowledge of mixing the four printer's primary colours (Cyan (blue) magenta (red) yellow and black) to create full-colour images.The reason for this insanely baroque process was that, at the time, the only way to print from painted artwork was to photograph the painting several times using coloured filters, a skilled and expensive process that made full-colour art very expensive to reproduce. By bypassing this process, Corben could afford to produce his own full-colour comics at a time when other small publishers could only afford black & white.

¡Hola J.A.R.!Thanks for the correction re Breccia's birthplace - I'll make sure to get that right from now on.I've always wanted to try this collage technique ever since I first saw Perramus, but it's a very advanced technique and it's taken me many years to work up the courage to try it (and then on computer, where mistakes are easily corrected). I also look on it as a chance to publicize Brecchia's work -w I've already done one interview (for the Megazine, here in the UK, to be published in (?)October) where I've talked about stickleback and Breccia's influence.I managed to pick up some more Brecchia albums recently (Che in Spanish, the French Edgar Allen Poe collection and Perramus books 3 & 4 in German) - tomorrow I start Spanish classes, and a big motivation for that is to be able to read my Spanish language comics :-)